So I guess there seems to be two questions in my mind that I have yet to see decent answers to from the ‘free culture’ camp.

1. If we go down the ‘information should be free’ (as in free beer) route, who pays the salaries of all of the people who are working to make these materials findable? And who pays for all the electricity to keep the disks spinning? N.B., the Pirate Bay feed of the JSTOR articles has been down for most of this morning. Perhaps they should consider charging a fee for either publication or access so that they can hire some proper system administrators to keep this from happening ;)

2. If you are going to pick on a cost model, why pick the humanities at all? Where costs are relatively low compared to the sciences…

The closing quotation at the end of the article is a further example of my continued bafflement. They quote a friend of Swartz:

“What Aaron’s case begs us to remember is that universities are supposed to be public, not-for-profit institutions,” Mr. Summers says. “They owe a standing moral debt to the public.”

This sort of statement can get me really worked up and at its simplest shows a misunderstanding of a) universities b) morals c) public and d) debt, but I will save that for another day. In short, what I still fail to see is an understanding of how much work it takes to making something actually accessible. A torrent file containing a big lump of text or pdfs is NOT accessible for soooo many reasons. This may be making something free (as in free beer) but it is not free (as in free speech).

I am so very interested in seeing more cultural heritage material freely available. It is what I have spent the last 15 years doing. I also make all of my scholarly publications freely available and have turned down offers to publish from places that either charge too much and/or won’t let me retain rights. This is a great model for freely scholarly content going forward, but it takes lots and lots of money to ‘free’ historical information. Someone has to pay for this work.

The arrest of Aaron Swartz recently for downloading 4.5 million articles from JSTOR has revived discussions about whether online full text subscription databases like JSTOR ‘should’ be acting as gatekeepers to our cultural heritage. Most of the discussion, though, seems to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what JSTOR and other such services do (note I call them services, not collections or content providers), and by association, call into question the role of libraries.

First common argument: Isn’t it ridiculous that JSTOR charges $12 for a download of a single article to users who don’t have access to a subscription?

Answer: Yes! This is a fundamental failure on the part of JSTOR to update their pricing model. They would sell far more than enough articles if they a) used the Apple $.99 download model and b) diversified their distribution model to take into account the other places people now get ePubs.

Second common argument: But JSTOR is selling access to an article that is otherwise freely available because it is in the public domain. Isn’t that crazy/immoral?

Answer: No. This is where you need to understand what JSTOR, Web of Science, Scopus, etc. do. They are services that provide access to collections. They do this by creating rich, article-level metadata and often by indexing the full text of something. Lots of old books that are in the public domain have been digitized by Google. Hundreds of thousands of scholars, though, still find Early English Books Online (a subscription database) to be useful. Why? Because it is useful to have accurately described books that have painstakingly hand-corrected text. You can find things. And someone has to pay to keep all those people that do the hard work of describing things employed.

What we now consider big content providers–Wiley, ProQuest, Ebsco, etc.–came from a world of indexing services. No one thought it was crazy to pay LexisNexis for their news or law research services, even though you could acquire the content for less elsewhere. You used LexisNexis because it allowed you to find the content in a fraction of the time you could have otherwise.

And this is where this becomes an interesting argument about libraries. Are libraries storehouses of content, or are they places that help you find things? They aren’t doing any good as the former if they aren’t doing the latter.

A couple of interesting ideas have converged this week and I think they are worth looking at together. First Seth Godin set of a firestorm amongst librarians, when he wrote about the future of libraries (and librarianship):

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture.

It is really an excellent post and highlights a lot of what I have been saying for a while about libraries being spaces for learning and creation, and not repositories of content.

A recent post by Kent Anderson at The Scholarly Kitchen interpreted Godin’s post and some other recent writings on the subject as a problem of tying the librarian too closely with the library.

Librarians have a lot to offer, but as long as they are tied to libraries, the calculation will continue to be:

book warehouse shrinks > need fewer librarians

I think there is danger in taking this approach. I think there is a lot of hope for libraries in the future, just not as books warehouses. The danger is that as libraries recreate themselves back into something more interesting than book warehouses, librarians will miss out on participating in that creation.

The problem isn’t about linking librarians with libraries, it is in linking libraries with books–or any content for that matter. This obsession with the library as warehouse is really just a blip in the long life of libraries–one that has otherwise been centred on libraries as active spaces for knowledge creation. If we go back to that model, it doesn’t matter if libraries are filled with books and manuscripts or iPads and Kindles, what matters is that libraries are filled with people. And the role of the librarian is to promote serendipity…to act as provocateur…to re-shuffle the shelves and to curate collections in ways that make people think.

As Ethan Zuckerman recently pointed out, people are going to be longing for serendipity. The library is one place (virtual or digital) that may be able to provide it. The lingering question is whether librarians will have the toolset to run these spaces.

I am very pleased to have an article in the most recent issue of Glimpse Journal, all about text. The article was informed by my recent research on the use of digitization in the Tibetan diaspora. I had been studying the impact of digitization on the scholars of Tibetan and Himalayan studies, but found a fascinating side-theme about the use of technology to replicate prayers and sacred texts within the community.

I really enjoy the RSA Animates series. This one from Sir Ken Robinson about changing education paradigms is particularly relevant to libraries. He speaks in part about divergent or lateral thinking, and of a study that showed that divergent thinking decreases with the level of education.

I wonder if this is in part a sign of the failure of libraries to support divergent thinking…Libraries (and museums for that matter) should provide a complement to formal and structured learning. A place to explore the informal, the unstructured and the lateral. I’ve met dozens of people who have told me that libraries and schools were their primary places for learning because they just couldn’t fit into the structure provided by school.

The downfall, of course, of changing our educational institutions to accommodate lateral thinking is that you loose the people who like and need the structure provided by the Enlightenment-inspired systems. Libraries and schools need to work together more to provide the opportunity for multiple styles of learning and learners.

Barbara Fister of the ‘Library Babel Fish’ blog recently posted a rather scathing response to an article in The Scientist about the danger of journal cancellations by academic libraries. Worried that the cancellation of journals due to library budget cuts will affect scientific research, the author quotes one scientist, “it’s time for faculty to stop being complacent about library cuts and put pressure on their administration to increase resources.”

That’s all well and good, administration should increase resources to libraries, but as Fister points out, the problem is much, much deeper then journal subscriptions. This is about understanding that the whole model is broken. She says to faculty:

You continue to equate prestige with the traditional way of publishing things, and even when you have the option of self-archiving your work to make it accessible to those poor suckers who lost library access, you can’t be arsed (as my English friends would say). This is not a library problem. This is your problem, and throwing more money at it, gratifying though that may be for libraries, won’t fix anything. (more here)

Dan Greenstein did a particularly nice job at the recent ‘Survive or Thrive’ conference of explaining the current relationship between academic libraries and their parent organizations (universities) and the impact of the current fiscal crisis on that relationship.

I particularly appreciate that he focuses not on what we can do in libraries going forward, but what we ought to be doing. One of the things he points out is that most libraries spend most of their budget on their general holdings (that is, the things that are not unique). He argues that we should be spending our time/efforts/budget on those things that make us unique.

He emphasized that libraries needs to move quickly–and as a community–to develop services.

The principles came from a time of self-reflection when he and others in the design world were a bit concerned by the state of the world – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.”

Good design is innovative

Good design makes a product useful

Good design is aesthetic

Good design makes a product understandable

Good design is unobtrusive

Good design is honest

Good design is long-lasting

Good design is thorough, down to the last detail

Good design in environmentally friendly

Good design is as little design as possible

Sometimes these days I feel about about technology (educational technologies in particular) the way Rams was feeling about design. To be honest, most days the web feels to me like “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” So what if we borrow Rams principles and apply them to technology? I think they fit pretty well. I think there are some powerful ideas in looking at technology this way and I could probably go on and on about each of these (I particularly like 10) .. but for now I will just leave you to think about this:

As someone who spends more time thinking about academic libraries than public ones I am interested in the language used on both sides of the debate to characterize libraries. And while I am saddened by the potential closure of so many libraries (mostly because I think once you close a library you are never really likely to get it back…despite the new NYPL branch), I am almost more saddened at the language used in the American Libraries article to describe libraries.

“Libraries are about books and librarians,” said one of the Boston residents protesting the closures. And BPL’s president Amy Ryan called librarians “information navigators” and said, “we can’t take a car designed in the 1970s onto today’s information superhighway.”

I think they are both wrong. If you look at the opening of the NYPL branch it seems to me that the most important thing in public libraries are the people who go into them. As much as I hate to say this (being both a fan of books and a librarian), we can’t build or sustain libraries for books, information, or librarians, we have to build them for people and communities.

The University of Michigan recently announced that it was finally getting rid of its card catalogue. This elicited many a response from librarians on some of the listservs I monitor who were sad to see it go. Most of the responses were emotional, revealing warm and fuzzy affection for the old system; but it led me to wonder what we are actually losing when we replaced cards with OPACs… and I think it has to do with browsing. The card system facilitated a type of browsing that we have not yet achieved online. It nicely complemented shelf browsing, but was not a substitute or virtual replacement for shelf browsing. Upon approaching a card catalogue you got an immediate sense of the scope of the collection and browsing within the cards did the same within sub-units of the collection.

At the risk of sounding too much like a change-fearing librarian myself, I am not saying that we can’t do this with online catalogues, just that we haven’t — and we certainly haven’t in libraries (that I know of…I would love to be proved wrong on this). Monica Bulger has a nice post on affinity-based browsing (and a follow up) and I would love to see an application of what she is talking about in an academic setting. It is still search-based (that is, it starts with a search) but could be an interesting way of providing new types of browsing in libraries.